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She was enthusiastic about investing in human rights training for the Sudanese police. Unfortunately, she said, according to the embassy’s local perception studies, “people don’t trust the police, and we don’t want to invest irresponsibly.”

“Imagine,” she said, sighing, “a country where people …

We were at Ozone, a café in Khartoum 2, an area of the city popular with expats. I didn’t like the place. It was a well-watered fantasy, full of Khartoum’s favored families and the busy heads of humanitarian agencies. Yet there I was. Everyone wanted to meet at Ozone. The best waffles in the world,…

Growing up, I thought that real politics was collective struggle, but over the past decade I’d begun to fear the era of mass movements had come to an end. My political life had desiccated. I briefed diplomats and wrote angry missives for the United Nations and Swiss NGOs about brutal government mil…

Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer features many great anecdotes, like Derluguian’s discovery that “the headquarters of the Islamic battalion are now located at Rosa Luxemburg Street, 12,” in Grozny. But no one — except grad students — reads a two-decade-old work of historical sociology for the details. Wha…

I do. The psychology of creative writing fascinates me—how different voices and points of view come into being. The reader’s involvement is crucial as well. Sometimes I think of the way a writer opens a novel as akin to how clinical psychology begins, with a kind of contract that the reader—God, I …